„Nordschleife“-rollout before Blancpain 1000

Pierre Ehret and his teammates Pierre Kaffer and Alexander Mattschull archieved a 23th place overall and 6th in class (GT3) on the debut of their all new Ferrari F458 Italia GT3 at tthe 6th heat of the VLN Endurance Championship on the Nürburgring. The first outing of an actual GT3-contender from Ferrari on the legendary track took place under difficult whether-conditions and so Ehret took a positive conclusion for the debut race of the car, which was run by the german GT-Corse-team.

„Especially here on the Nordschleife you cannot expect to mess up with the well experienced squads for the win right from the beginning when starting with a brand new car. We had several small technical issues - wipers, the TC, and probably the exhaust-configuration – which were not severe but contributing to the result. But our team did a good job in sorting all things out one by one. So finally the finish with 6th in class was what we expected.“

After a 19th place in Qualifing (gridsize: 162 cars), Pierre Kaffer soon climbed up to 6th overall. Rain togeher with with Traction–Control problems on the car meant that Kaffer had to crawl back one lap of about 22km on slicks during torrential rain, dropping him down to 60th in the field. Ehret took over and improved on wets to about 20th position. Alexander Mattschull was struggeling with the tire choice, but managed to hold position untill the race was redflagged 10 minutes before its end when the rain came back heavily.

„Now we prepare next week to race the car at the Blancpain 1000 at the Nürburgring Grand-Prix-circuit. I will share the car there with Alexander Mattschull and a 3rd driver still to be determined. We´ll be the only german team in the gentleman trophys class. And the weekend after this we have scheduled another VLN-race to get more miles on our car.“